Taiwan as an "uncertain imagined community" in transformation : changing the history curriculum in the post-martial law era (from 1990s to 2008)

Through discussing the history curricular reforms in the post-Martial Law era (1990s-2008), this thesis locates Taiwan's nation-building within the broader global context. This thesis argues that the new history curriculum has increasingly echoed global norms in how it deconstructed the Chinese history curriculum and constructed the subjectivity of Taiwanese history. I also examine how, from three perspectives, the history curriculum privileges a Taiwanese nationalist project in this nation-building process. First, under the new democratic circumstances, anti-colonial global norms via the operation of Western academic hegemony disciplined the field of historiography and history curricula in Taiwan. These norms also offered the possibility of breaking away from traditional Chinese nationalism. Second, the Taiwanese nationalists advocated more radical ideas of modernity and skillfully applied them to the history curriculum reform under the operation logic of contemporary multiculturalism. Their active involvement often resulted in the curriculum reform moving toward the direction they favoured. Other ideological camps usually passively followed their ideas. Third, important actors, including some politicians, curriculum guideline committees, approval committee members, and textbook authors, had structural impacts on the change of the curriculum; However, institutional intersection, resistance from non-official fields and structural constraints from national and international realpolitik seemed to keep the history curriculum reforms from achieving all the intended goals of the Taiwanese nationalists.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo